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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

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I don't know why it is just GPL people talk about. MPL, Apache, MIT licenses all have additional terms beyond a basic public domain equivalent license. None of those terms are being respected.

I agree with your point, I'm just using the GPL as an example of a license people tend to know the stipulations of.

Not OP and I don’t really comment on the topic much at all, but one reason I would expect more talk about GPL than those permissive licenses: I would also expect a greater likelihood of murky infringement cases becoming a legal matter. Just a hunch, possibly a very wrong one, mostly informed by how I’d evaluate choosing among these licenses.

Compliance with MIT/X11 license just requires distributing the license file with the binary. If you infringe, it is trivial and costless to correct.

Copyleft licenses are more troublesome for those who would rather not release source code. GPL is being used as a stand-in for all copyleft licenses.

It is not costless to correct if you don't know who's code was an input in the first place.

It's intractable to preemptively avoid all possible copyright claims, but correcting them after being called out on it only requires adding the license and attribution required by whoever's currently suing you.

Yes... and no...

Courts -- under common law jurisdictions -- don't interpret contracts and licenses literally. If you stick within the spirit of a license or contract, you might be okay (even if you break the letter), and vice-versa.

Beyond that, it's a question of damages and consequences. Omitting a warranty disclaimer isn't likely to result in a lot of damages.

And finally, there are odds of getting sued. If you infringe on my AGPL code, I'll be pissed. I used that license for a reason. On the other hand, I /hope/ my MIT-licensed code is reused in commercial products. If you infringe on some term, I probably won't care.

There's a lot more nuance than that, starting with statutory law jurisdictions like France to things like statutory damages, and I'm intentionally oversimplifying.

However, from a 10,000 foot view infringing on the GPL versus on an MIT license are very different beasts, and there's good reason to be a lot more worried about the former.

A warranty disclaimer is important, and there can certainly be damages argued.

Also important is attribution.

If you upload it to github, you give microsoft extra rights above the license you choose. I'm not sure they are bound by the license.

Those "extra rights" would need to be spelled out in the terms of service, and last I checked, they were basically just making sure GitHub had the legal right to host your code on the GitHub service. It did not include any provision to create and distribute derivative works outside the license included with the software being hosted.

I read

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Chapter D4 gives microsoft the right to: parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers

I don't know what a real court says, but I can imagine a lawyer saying training an AI is done by analyzing your code.

Chapter D5 gives almost anybody right to do a lot with your code, including creating derived works, as long as it happens on github. If the AI training happens on their servers, I think you agreed to them training an AI.

Not saying they are doing it right now based on that document. But I do assume a lawyer has enough material to make the waters really muddy, and a trial being decide by basically a dice roll.

This is nonsense. The uploader is not necessarily the copyright holder of the code. The uploader is not necessarily in a position to grant extra rights above the actual license.

What happens if someone else uploads my code to github?

What happens if proprietary code is uploaded to github?

What happens if national secrets are posted to github?

In all of those cases, the person doing the upload does not "own" the content, nor did they choose the license.

There is no reasonable read of a ToS agreement that would allow Microsoft/Github extra rights to that content.

One can only hope that this will work better than their software support.

I wonder how customers will have to prove that the contested code was actually output by Copilot.

Obviously it wouldn't be so straightforward.

Microsoft would have access to your usage history, and would be able to easily prove your intended theft as a user if any of your prompts or usage history made it clear that you were attempting to subvert a license.

If anything, this temporarily shifts the battleground out of the courts and into prompt engineering space.

It would need to look like an accident for a bad actor to pull this off.

>would be able to easily prove

Possible, perhaps. But what makes you think this is easily provable? Intent is hard at the best of times.

I would consider it on you to demonstrate that you can get Copilot to produce copyrighted content without obviously asking for it.

You're asking them to go and use copilot with the intention of showing that copilot can be used to unintentionally infringe on copyright? That sounds pretty tricky.

This is the same website that rejoiced when Oracle v Google resulted in a Google victory, despite Google arguably doing similar. They did so with 11,000 lines of Oracle's code, but it was decided to be fair use. If that's the case... I don't think a regurgitation of 12 lines of GPL code by accident here and there will be a strong argument against fair use.

Adding to that: How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there? ;)

11,000 lines of _declaring_ code-- the API signatures.

Defining the “what” is just as much a part of the intellectual property as defining the “how”. Both things are hard to do well IMHO

> Both things are hard to do well IMHO

That's not really a factor in determining what's eligible for copyright protection.

Indeed. They’re both eligible.

The API signatures were arguably the only thing that mattered.

The API signatures were arguably the only part that was copyrightable.

Code that is purely utilitarian (see “useful articles doctrine”) isn’t a work of human expression that is copyrightable.

>How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there?

I always thought that code snippets that small are not considered by the Courts to be eligible for 'copyright protection'.

In that case, is Copilot regurgitating 25 or so lines of GPL code, less than 1% of the time, eligible for copyright protection?

Why do you think it would only be 25 lines?

Because that is about, so far, the longest piece of clearly, demonstrably unique code that has ever been shown to have been copied. The longest you’d ever be able to clearly convince a court with, at least.

https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554/pho...

I always include a comment with the SO URL (though I haven't copied any code from SO in quite some time—it's not nearly as useful as it used to be).

I do think this is relevant to the conversation.

I don’t copy/paste code from SO but there is sometimes inevitable duplication because sometimes there is only one right way to do something! Copyright can stray into the case of the ridiculous pretty quickly.

Is an interface declaration inherently different from, say, a merge sort implementation? It’s all code. But they also serve very different purposes. I do not think prior to Google v Oracle there was much case law to distinguish between different types of code, but in the industry we recognize all kinds of nuance.

I'm not HN.

Good. Screw companies trying to assert copyright over 10 line functions that reverse a string.

Those kind of functions are arguably not even eligible for copyright protection because they contain no human expression of the kind that is usually protectable (e.g., creative writings, artistic works).

This only applies if you use the filters they have that prevent code from being copied directly, so that shouldn’t be likely to happen

Good.

Why would you need to launder? The output isn't under GPL to begin with. This is just so small teams can use it without having to deal with all the frivolous lawsuits.

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